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African‐Americans shoulder an excessive burden of unemployment, precarious employment, and low paying jobs in the United States, which may help explain why they experience some of the worst health outcomes among U.S. citizens. This paper presents a conceptual framework describing this phenomenon. The social determinants of health as described by this framework include racism, social and public policy formation, socioeconomic status, and conditions of employment. The intermediate determinants of health, which include the ability to afford health behavior, depression and addiction, environmental exposures, and access to primary care, are informed by conditions of employment, which leads to poor health outcomes for African‐Americans. This paper will explore in detail these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term 'disadvantaged child', in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street-with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants-argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught 'affective skills' and proper social relations during times of political crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the beliefs of 56 US-based senior international business executives regarding the importance of multinational corporations' involvement in the improvement of host countries' human rights, poverty, education, health care and environment. The results of this pilot study suggest that all five areas are considered important, with the environmental responsibilities of MNCs being perceived as the most important of these five areas. Little significant difference was found with regards to the executives' views of importance based on either their having lived overseas or based on the international component of their current job activity, with one exception: those executives with more than 50% of their job involving international activities believed that MNCs had a significantly greater environmental responsibility in host countries than did those with less job-related international activity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the substantial body of research on the psychological and social effects of racial segregation in schools on African Americans, few studies have considered the possibility that more racially inclusive schools might reduce the risk of extremely negative adult life experiences such as incarceration. Yet such a connection is made plausible by research linking black racial isolation in schools to variables that are often associated with incarceration rates, including concentrated poverty, and low educational and occupational aspirations and attainment. In this paper, we apply methods first developed by labor economists to assess the impact of racial inclusiveness in schools on individual incarceration rates for 5-year cohorts of African Americans and whites born since 1930. We find strong support for the conclusion that blacks educated in states where a higher proportion of their classmates were white experienced significantly lower incarceration rates as adults. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the effects of racial inclusiveness on black incarceration rates have grown stronger over time. These longitudinal effects are consistent with the argument that the educational climate of predominantly black schools has deteriorated in more recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an "hourglass" economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversify. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in - and consequences for - American society are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors' experiences of observing teaching and learning in schools have led them to become concerned at the dominant paradigm of a ‘pedagogy of poverty' at the expense of a ‘pedagogy of plenty’. Bernstein's theory of power and control of education knowledge is overtly practised in classrooms globally. This is evidenced in the narrowing of the curriculum in response to the ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiative in the USA and the centrally imposed National Strategies and Standards agenda in the UK. Bernstein's theory is still a means of clarifying the relationships between social class, family income and the education process. It introduced the concept of ‘restricted and elaborated codes’, which has been labelled by its critics as a deficit model for the working-class population. The authors contest that expectations for this new meritocracy have failed to materialise and the expectations for equity have been reduced by the prevailing metric. This ‘pedagogy of poverty’ is now practised in the current ‘one size fits all’ model of teaching and learning operating within narrow accountability based on a ‘testocracy’. This case study demonstrates one teacher using guided group work as a potential strategy for a ‘pedagogy of plenty’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the history of debates over the US Head Start programme (1965), Early Head Start (1994) and the UK Sure Start initiative (1998), as a window on to policy transfer. In all the three, the aim was that early intervention could offer a means of boosting children’s educational attainment and of countering the wider effects of poverty on development. Nevertheless, there were also important differences between them. The first part of the article looks at UK responses to Head Start, the second at Early Head Start and the creation and subsequent direction taken by Sure Start. In the Conclusion, we sum up the arguments relating to Head Start and Sure Start and offer some broader reflections on policy transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the effects of poverty measures implemented by the State of Connecticut. The poverty measures recommended by the National Academy of Sciences requires the State to assess the condition of families by measuring all its resources and also considering the taxes and expenses incurred by it. The antipoverty effects likely to change child care, adult education and child support policies are also discussed. The article also discusses the potential difficulties that a state might face in implementing a modern poverty measure and in generating policy alternatives.

A growing body of research suggests that the first few years of life are a particularly promising time to intervene in the lives of low-income children, although the long-term effects on children of the U.S. government's primary early childhood program—Head Start—remains the topic of debate. In this article we review what is known about Head Start and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are large enough to justify the program's costs. Although in principle there could be more beneficial ways of deploying Head Start resources, the benefits of such changes remain uncertain and there is some downside risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the experiences of a man who had stayed and studied in the U.S. and the things he had discovered on his return to his native country, which made him ponder that possibly, Americans are the only ones who are blessed. The man has made reference to the luxuries afforded by the Americans who are bestowed with abundant resources such as food, clothing, education as well as a convenient lifestyle as compared to the poverty, which is prevalent in his country. His story on the conditions of his countrymen has brought with it a certain call of awareness for Americans to be more appreciative and be more involved in preserving their environment. Science education plays a significant role in developing that state of awareness and in nourishing positive attitudes.